In what was considered to be a cultural milestone, Lighthouse Technologies provided Chicago’s Jay Pritzker Pavillion in the city’s Millennium Park with its revolutionary VideoBlades™ LED video display for a recent simulcast of the Paris Opéra Ballet’s Giselle, presented live by Chicago’s Harris Theater and the Grant Park Orchestra.

“For many years we’ve been looking for the perfect large format screen system to bring our outdoor audiences an experience of added dimension, through both live and recorded presentations, day or night,” says Donna LaPietra, Chairman of Millennium Park. “Lighthouse VideoBlades™ delivers that product. Images are bright, clear and refined from the front row seats to the very back of the lawn 600 feet (183 metres) away, from high noon to moonlight.”

VideoBlades™ is a revolutionary large-scale LED video display technology that straddles the worlds of video and lighting in the entertainment, events and architectural markets. VideoBlades™ 12, used for the Giselle simulcast, provides a 12.5mm pixel pitch, modular LED video screen that delivers superb image quality both indoors and outdoors.

VideoBlades™ comes in two formats, SkyRoll™ and GroundRoll™, which can be deployed by rolling up or down from its patented rotating structure, just like a window shade. The modular format allows for the seamless formation of large-scale screens limited in size only by a customer’s needs. For the Paris Opera Ballet simulcast.

Lighthouse used Groundroll for the Millennium Park event, which deploys up from the floor, resulting in the lowest possible rigged weight. GroundRoll screens can be simply and seamlessly joined together to produce displays of unlimited width. Here, four separate Groundrolls produced a state-of-the-art screen measuring 32.5 feet wide by 16.5 feet high (9.906m by 5.029m).

“It was exciting to be part of an important cultural event such as the Paris Opéra Ballet,” says Ed Whitaker, Lighthouse N.A.S.A. director of sales. “Simulcasting the event presented an opportunity to not only showcase our VideoBlades™ display, but to give back to the community.”

The capacity crowd of 11,000 watched Giselle performed by the world famous Paris Opéra Ballet, the oldest ballet company in the world, which dates back to 1669. The performance marked the launch of the Paris Opéra Ballet’s 2012 North American tour, and was the first-ever free outdoor simulcast of a live performance by an international ballet company at Millennium Park.

“The VideoBlades™ screen Lighthouse provided performed far beyond every possible expectation,” says Michael Tiknis, President and Managing Director of the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. “It helped make the Millennium Park simulcast a world-class event.”

About Gasoline Media

Owner and director, Sarah James, has worked in the AV/entertainment technology industry for over 25 years, initially in publishing at Disco International and Live! Magazines, moving into public relations in 1993 and setting up Gasoline Media in 2000.